The fine post is 131 words long and includes absolutely no links to articles about exactly what's happening. It's just an inflammatory headline and three paragraphs that are extremely short on citations.
I have a cheap two-plug headset. I plug it in. Doesn't work. The mike doesn't work at all, not with skype, not with arecord. Looking around, the best advice I can find is from my motherboard manual -- apparently I have to change the sound hardware on my PC to run in "2-channel" mode before the mike will work. Can't find any way in ALSA to do that -- if ALSA is even the right place to make that configuration. There's a lot of sound-ish things running on my box: alsa, alsa-oss, artsd, alsamixer, kmix, the xine multimedia engine that amarok uses...
I'm in a hurry to get Skype working on Kubuntu, and my two-plug headset's really uncomfortable anyway, so I pick up a Logitech USB headset. It works awesomely; I can select the new device on Skype and it sounds great with their echo service. Except I leave it plugged in when I next reboot, and the order of the sound devices gets switched. The headset is now device 1 -- the default device, and the onboard sound is device 2. I want to only use the headset for Skype, but everything wants to play through it, and I can't find options in Amarok or Kaffeine to point their Xine engines at device 2. I think there's some way to fix this with an.asoundrc file, but I'm a busy guy, so I just reboot without the thing plugged in -- and then I boot up bzflag and my sound is gone. Something has dropped an.asoundrc file in my home directory. Moving it and bzflag's config file aside were the only way I could get bzflag sound back.
Given an hour or so, I'm sure I can fix this, but hours are precious. All this hardware--even the crappy cheapie two-eighth-inch-plug headset--worked great when I booted into Windows. Zero hassle.
I love tinkering with linux, and I've learned tons by messing with it, and it's getting closer to Grandma's desk every day. Still, I'd never give it to anyone who wasn't an enthusiast, or who wasn't backed by an ace IT department. That last 5% of polish is still missing.
Cleanflix, at one point, offered a "sanitized" version of Enemy at the Gates. (I can't confirm if they still do, as their site is slashdotted.)
So, by them, it's okay for kids to see guys getting mown down crossing a river, blown to pieces by artillery shells, and executed by Red Army commissars -- but God forbid they should be exposed to a couple minutes of filthy sniper sex.
It's a little big for your jacket pocket, but I wrote half a novel on mine.
Pros: The keyboard is awesome and, with no moving parts to power, the battery life is fantastic--six hours for me, easy. The screen is bright and 640x480 will give you all the text you need to see. It weighs 2.6 pounds. Instant-on. Pocket Office is in ROM.
Cons: Pocket Office is in ROM. WinCE is a little...buggy. You definitely want to store your documents on CompactFlash rather than relying on the battery-backed RAM of the unit.
You can also look at the HP Jornada 820 for another example of a WinCE mini-laptop. I like the IBM better--the Jornada isn't as sturdy, it's slower, the keyboard isn't as nice, and the screen gets hella-bad interference from something in the machine. But if you can get one cheap, it's okay. I wrote the other half of a novel on one.
I saw something similar at the 2003 Nebula awards in Seattle. Dr. Rick Rashid, founder of Microsoft Research, gave the keynote address. He had some video for us, but he couldn't figure out how to make Windows Media Player play through the banquet room's projector. All we got was a black square surrounded by that horrendous WMP silver-blob interface.
It was funny to see him squirm. Of course, someone in the back yelled out for him to "get a Mac!" We never did see the exciting video he promised.
Though his address was dull as dishwater--it dealt mostly in boring generalities that did nothing to excite either my IT self or my SF self--he did unintentionally demonstrate a primary motif of SF: that technology by itself isn't interesting--rather, it's the malfunctions that are interesting.
Crichton isn't really an SF author
on
Prey
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The New Yorker had this criticism of Crichton:
[Crichton is] forever describing things that could change the world--but don't. The Andromeda strain of space germs mutates into harmlessness and goes away; the lost city of the Congo is wiped from the map by lava; in Sphere, the discoverers of the extraterrestrial artifact of untold power use that power to wish it into retroactive nonexistence. The fact that Crichton has no interest in showing what might have happened is what makes him a writer of suspense fiction, rather than of science fiction. A science-fiction writer would naturally want to see what would happen if the technologies stayed out of control (as most do), and might even want to ask whether the consequences would be all bad (as they often aren't). Might not free-range dinosaurs make Costa Rica an even more interesting place than it is today? What if nanoswarms offered promise as well as peril? Prey, with its kill-them-all-and-get-out approach, is neither as frightening nor as fascinating as Greg Bear's novelette of twenty years ago, "Blood Music," in which the characters, transformed by the nanotechnology within them, become both far more and much less than human.
I think they're pretty much dead-on. I've always been unsatisfied with Crichton's stuff. His books read like kinda like Star Trek episodes: when they end, the genies are always jammed back into their bottles.
(taken from Patrick Nielsen Hayden's blog)
Hey man, rather than telling us about the Hollywood hirelings who art-directed it, why not tell us who *wrote* the stories in the damn thing?
(I've been reading Slashdot too long. When I saw the title "Eula Makes Up Her Mind" my first thought was that the story was about a Microsoft click-through license that had somehow attained sentience. shiver.)
Table of contents:
Foreword: The Unknown Possibilities of Existence By Lawrence M. Krauss
Introduction By Orson Scott Card
"They Go Bump" - David Barr Kirtley
"Twenty-Two Buttons" - Rebecca Carmi
"The Hanged Man, the Lovers and the Fool" - Justin Stanchfield
"Empire of Dreams and Miracles" - James Maxey
"The Messiah" - Carl Frederick
"Eula Makes Up Her Mind" - Daniel Conover
"Carthaginian Rose" - Ken Liu
"Rippers" - Chris Leonard
"The Compromise" - Rick Sabian
"Who Lived in a Shoe" - Andrew Rey
"The Prize" - David Barr Kirtley
"Great Theme Prisons of the World" - Carl Frederick
if you look at.NET, HailStorm, and a lot of other "initiatives" that Microsoft has on the table, they're going the "service" route, which is something that Free Software / Open Source has been doing for a while. Give away the software, charge for support and possibly access to world-wide servers.
Try not paying for your Office QZ subscription in 2004 and see how long you can use it after it expires. This does not, to me, equate with "giving it away."
Who says you can't sell the software? Certainly not RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, IBM, or any of the other Linux vendors or reseller. What is stopping you?
At my job (I work for a research company) superior software is one of our primary competitive advantages in a crowded field. Why should I share my software with my competitors and give away a bit of my company's advantage?
There are dozens of ways that you can make money off of your software. You can charge for sending it to people on CD, you can write a book on how to use it and sell the book. You can setup support contracts with people or (more likely) companies (Those can be worth quite a few bucks).
Yes, but I am good at writing computer programs. I am not good at writing technical manuals, nor do I want to work in an interrupt-driven tech support organization in order to earn my daily bread.
Perhaps some day the revolution will succeed, all software will be both libre and gratis, and I'll be forced to do something else to keep me in pudding and matches. Fine. Those're the slings and arrows. But for now, I'm happy working in a closed-source shop, and I'm not going to push to get that changed.
Don't get me wrong -- I think free software is enormously valuable, and I benefit from it every single day. In fact, I'm starting to feel guilty pangs for not personally contributing to the movement outside of the occasional Bugzilla report. But I believe that people and companies -- from Metallica to Microsoft to my own shop -- have the right to define the terms on which they benefit from their intellectual work. If they want to give it away, that's awesome. If they don't, then that's fine too -- the market will deal with them if the price ain't right.
The NYTimes does not _need_ to advertise that heavily; it's shortsighted, greedy behavior and is akin to a sort of 'psychic pollution.' When we let businesses get away with pollution, they did it and defended their ability to do so as 'necessary.. It certainly wouldn't be impossible to enact legislation that barred some or many advertisements
Your pollution analogy is broken; while I can choose not to pay attention to billboards, banner ads, or TV commercials in my vicinity, I can't choose not to breathe the air next to Union Carbide plant if I happen to be in that area. One situation calls out for regulation, the other does not.
And while I agree with you that advertising at least taints the mindspace, I'm unwilling to give the government more power to regulate the mindspace. Pervasive advertising is the lesser of those evils, I think, for all the standard slippery-slope reasons.
(they really imagine that the/. community wouldn't spring up elsewhere if Andover went bankrupt?)
Just so long as the "elsewhere" had tons of $$ that they were willing to piss away on kickass hardware, fat pipes, editorial salaries, and the occasional lawyer. I don't know where that elsewhere might be -- do you?
Dunno if you're shooting to be funny or just being a troll, but here goes.
The trouble here is that English just doesn't have a good gender-ambiguous pronoun family. While there have been attempts to invent a new one (ISTR that someone proposed "hir" for gender-ambiguous possessive), the more common approach is to kludge wider definitions onto existing words.
So some people use "he", some people use "s/he", some people use "they", some people use "she", and others alternate between "she" and "he."
Honestly, I don't see what the big deal is. Western society's far more inclusive gender-wise than it was fifty years ago. Why shouldn't the language reflect that?
Doesn't anyone else with a brain in their head find this disappointing?
Nope. I find it empowering. Look at it this way: if you didn't matter, why would companies spend so much time and money trying to sucker you into buying their stuff?
We're in the survey biz here too, and a primary part of our business is to use our clients' email lists to invite people to surveys.
We are *very* careful about spam charges, since getting dropped into the RBL could doom us. At the bottom of our invitation emails, we carefully explain exactly how we obtained the person's email address, we clearly state our client's name, and we provide multiple recourses for people who think they've been emailed wrongly. Given the cynicism about "unsubscribe me" addresses, I'm not sure if anyone would ever use them, but we do provide it.
We're not a pyramid scam or a dick-extension house, we make good-faith efforts to ensure that we don't piss people off, and we don't make any attempt to hide who we are or who we're serving. So I don't have any trouble sleeping at night over our survey invitation policies.
zo.
ps. The fact that our survey invitations usually parse in English distinguishes us from 99% of spam, anyway.
There were professional armies that (as of WWII) had not signed on to the Geneva Convention. Neither the Soviets nor the Japanese were signatories to it as of 1945.
The convention served the West well in the European theatre. The Germans, as far as I know, were pretty decent about honouring it for the western Allies. When the Germans took Soviet prisoners, though, anything went. Captured Soviets were completely deprived of basic necessities, so much so that many Western POWs risked harsh discipline to smuggle them food or water. Millions of Red Army POW's didn't go home.
The situation for German men captured by the Soviet Union was equally bleak.
That means that once the earth is full (whatever that point may be) we need to find another earth within the next doubling interval (right now, 30 years).
Wouldn't population control take care of itself if the earth was "full?"
zo.
They absolutely dread the notion of a free and open Net, for all of the obvious reasons -- it's a dogma killer.
I'd argue that this isn't as true as Katz believes it is. The net can match up white supremacists as easily as it can match up lonely quake-playing nerds.
Put another way: in the billion-channel universe, a person can choose exactly what information and people they want to seek out — and if my view of Western humanity is at all correct, it's unlikely that they'll seek out anything that doesn't reinforce what they already believe.
Of course, the net can potentially screw up the transmission of dogma across generations, by giving kids access to more diverse information sources. So I don't think Katz is completely off his nut, but he's simplifying a bit too much.
No, but it will be a big step. Still, a lot of that process is up to the individual. It's just that the individual can't even make the decision to strive for knowledge if he or she has no way to judge the quality of the information he or she is receiving.
All right! Let's create a Department of Truth, so that only the best information will be fed to our citizens!
I mean, the FCC's regulation has done wonders for the quality of news handed to us by the networks! (tell me again.. which network was it that staged t-bone collisions with bomb-laden trucks
so they could do a "news" feature on it?)
regulating the Internet should be like regulating food and drugs as much as it should be like regulating books, TV and movies. A hundred years ago, people had no way of determining the quality of the food and drugs that went into their bodies. Now they cannot determine what sources or forces may be behind the information that goes into their minds.
Yes, and I'm sure that methods for judging the quality of information -- methods that will transcend subjectivity -- will be available Real Soon Now. In the absence of that method, I'll hang on to the billion babbling voices of the Internet, thank you very much, Mr. Carr.
Disclaimer: IANAL, but my girlfriend is, and has some background in IP law.
As she explained it to me, the patent process, like the criminal justice system, is adversarial. There's no way the patent office can staff experts in every field in which it grants patents, so it relies on testimony from persons and/or organizations that have cause to oppose the patent in order to understand the issues involved.
So it looks to me like the system has built-in opportunities for activism. Does anyone know more about this, or have any links to any well-documented patent battles? Such might be instructive in replacing the usual whining about the idiocy of the system with an understanding of how to influence it.
Now, don't get me wrong. I see nothing wrong with eye candy, even if it is just for the sake of having more eye candy. As long as it is always optional
Dude, this is Linux. Everything is optional in Linux.
that I don't have to wait for that "pretty" penguin screen to disappear on my server before going to the command line, or worse yet, get stuck with a full X-based install on a system that I'm trying to set up to be headless
You think that suddenly every distribution of Linux is going to force you to "do a full X -based install" just because Linux has made inroads on the desktop? Man, that's paranoid. I'm sure that even if a consumer-grade Linux distro took off, highly-customizable geek-friendly versions will still be abundantly available.
Slashdot Mirror
This smells like anti-union astroturf.
The fine post is 131 words long and includes absolutely no links to articles about exactly what's happening. It's just an inflammatory headline and three paragraphs that are extremely short on citations.
> It's missing all the top tech companies - Google, Amazon, Microsoft, any of the gaming companies, Sun, etc. etc
Why would Amazon be on such a list?
My favorite bit: the camera zooms on a Matchbox 20 gift card while the voiceover chick says the words "cool and innovative."
I do enjoy the careful research and thoughtful analysis that goes into a Matt Hartley post. Bravo, Slashdot editors!
Seriously, why does Slashdot keep sending him ad revenue?
Hoo boy, yeah. You could give QuickBasic to a syphillitic chimpanzee and he'd come up with something slicker than Windows Media Player.
I run Kubuntu. I want to run Skype on Kubuntu.
.asoundrc file, but I'm a busy guy, so I just reboot without the thing plugged in -- and then I boot up bzflag and my sound is gone. Something has dropped an .asoundrc file in my home directory. Moving it and bzflag's config file aside were the only way I could get bzflag sound back.
I have a cheap two-plug headset. I plug it in. Doesn't work. The mike doesn't work at all, not with skype, not with arecord. Looking around, the best advice I can find is from my motherboard manual -- apparently I have to change the sound hardware on my PC to run in "2-channel" mode before the mike will work. Can't find any way in ALSA to do that -- if ALSA is even the right place to make that configuration. There's a lot of sound-ish things running on my box: alsa, alsa-oss, artsd, alsamixer, kmix, the xine multimedia engine that amarok uses...
I'm in a hurry to get Skype working on Kubuntu, and my two-plug headset's really uncomfortable anyway, so I pick up a Logitech USB headset. It works awesomely; I can select the new device on Skype and it sounds great with their echo service. Except I leave it plugged in when I next reboot, and the order of the sound devices gets switched. The headset is now device 1 -- the default device, and the onboard sound is device 2. I want to only use the headset for Skype, but everything wants to play through it, and I can't find options in Amarok or Kaffeine to point their Xine engines at device 2. I think there's some way to fix this with an
Given an hour or so, I'm sure I can fix this, but hours are precious. All this hardware--even the crappy cheapie two-eighth-inch-plug headset--worked great when I booted into Windows. Zero hassle.
I love tinkering with linux, and I've learned tons by messing with it, and it's getting closer to Grandma's desk every day. Still, I'd never give it to anyone who wasn't an enthusiast, or who wasn't backed by an ace IT department. That last 5% of polish is still missing.
1. Troll Mac users on Windows site.
2. Page hits for Windows site shoot up as furious Mac partisans flock to read the blasphemy.
3. Profit!
At least Thurriot puts the entire text of his articles on a single page, though.
Cleanflix, at one point, offered a "sanitized" version of Enemy at the Gates. (I can't confirm if they still do, as their site is slashdotted.)
So, by them, it's okay for kids to see guys getting mown down crossing a river, blown to pieces by artillery shells, and executed by Red Army commissars -- but God forbid they should be exposed to a couple minutes of filthy sniper sex.
What a fucking backwards country.
It's a little big for your jacket pocket, but I wrote half a novel on mine.
Pros: The keyboard is awesome and, with no moving parts to power, the battery life is fantastic--six hours for me, easy. The screen is bright and 640x480 will give you all the text you need to see. It weighs 2.6 pounds. Instant-on. Pocket Office is in ROM.
Cons: Pocket Office is in ROM. WinCE is a little...buggy. You definitely want to store your documents on CompactFlash rather than relying on the battery-backed RAM of the unit.
You can also look at the HP Jornada 820 for another example of a WinCE mini-laptop. I like the IBM better--the Jornada isn't as sturdy, it's slower, the keyboard isn't as nice, and the screen gets hella-bad interference from something in the machine. But if you can get one cheap, it's okay. I wrote the other half of a novel on one.
I saw something similar at the 2003 Nebula awards in Seattle. Dr. Rick Rashid, founder of Microsoft Research, gave the keynote address. He had some video for us, but he couldn't figure out how to make Windows Media Player play through the banquet room's projector. All we got was a black square surrounded by that horrendous WMP silver-blob interface.
It was funny to see him squirm. Of course, someone in the back yelled out for him to "get a Mac!" We never did see the exciting video he promised.
Though his address was dull as dishwater--it dealt mostly in boring generalities that did nothing to excite either my IT self or my SF self--he did unintentionally demonstrate a primary motif of SF: that technology by itself isn't interesting--rather, it's the malfunctions that are interesting.
Hey man, rather than telling us about the Hollywood hirelings who art-directed it, why not tell us who *wrote* the stories in the damn thing?
(I've been reading Slashdot too long. When I saw the title "Eula Makes Up Her Mind" my first thought was that the story was about a Microsoft click-through license that had somehow attained sentience. shiver.)
Table of contents:
Foreword: The Unknown Possibilities of Existence By Lawrence M. Krauss
Introduction By Orson Scott Card
"They Go Bump" - David Barr Kirtley
"Twenty-Two Buttons" - Rebecca Carmi
"The Hanged Man, the Lovers and the Fool" - Justin Stanchfield
"Empire of Dreams and Miracles" - James Maxey
"The Messiah" - Carl Frederick
"Eula Makes Up Her Mind" - Daniel Conover
"Carthaginian Rose" - Ken Liu
"Rippers" - Chris Leonard
"The Compromise" - Rick Sabian
"Who Lived in a Shoe" - Andrew Rey
"The Prize" - David Barr Kirtley
"Great Theme Prisons of the World" - Carl Frederick
The Phobos Fiction Contest
About the Authors
About the Judges
Will the Godzilla Prediction Network have their own control room for the laser-birds?
"Sir, Godzilla is approaching Tokyo!"
*zortch*
Perhaps some day the revolution will succeed, all software will be both libre and gratis, and I'll be forced to do something else to keep me in pudding and matches. Fine. Those're the slings and arrows. But for now, I'm happy working in a closed-source shop, and I'm not going to push to get that changed.
Don't get me wrong -- I think free software is enormously valuable, and I benefit from it every single day. In fact, I'm starting to feel guilty pangs for not personally contributing to the movement outside of the occasional Bugzilla report. But I believe that people and companies -- from Metallica to Microsoft to my own shop -- have the right to define the terms on which they benefit from their intellectual work. If they want to give it away, that's awesome. If they don't, then that's fine too -- the market will deal with them if the price ain't right.
zo.
And while I agree with you that advertising at least taints the mindspace, I'm unwilling to give the government more power to regulate the mindspace. Pervasive advertising is the lesser of those evils, I think, for all the standard slippery-slope reasons.
Just so long as the "elsewhere" had tons of $$ that they were willing to piss away on kickass hardware, fat pipes, editorial salaries, and the occasional lawyer. I don't know where that elsewhere might be -- do you?zo
The trouble here is that English just doesn't have a good gender-ambiguous pronoun family. While there have been attempts to invent a new one (ISTR that someone proposed "hir" for gender-ambiguous possessive), the more common approach is to kludge wider definitions onto existing words.
So some people use "he", some people use "s/he", some people use "they", some people use "she", and others alternate between "she" and "he."
Honestly, I don't see what the big deal is. Western society's far more inclusive gender-wise than it was fifty years ago. Why shouldn't the language reflect that?
zo.
Nope. I find it empowering. Look at it this way: if you didn't matter, why would companies spend so much time and money trying to sucker you into buying their stuff?
zo.
We are *very* careful about spam charges, since getting dropped into the RBL could doom us. At the bottom of our invitation emails, we carefully explain exactly how we obtained the person's email address, we clearly state our client's name, and we provide multiple recourses for people who think they've been emailed wrongly. Given the cynicism about "unsubscribe me" addresses, I'm not sure if anyone would ever use them, but we do provide it.
We're not a pyramid scam or a dick-extension house, we make good-faith efforts to ensure that we don't piss people off, and we don't make any attempt to hide who we are or who we're serving. So I don't have any trouble sleeping at night over our survey invitation policies.
zo.
ps. The fact that our survey invitations usually parse in English distinguishes us from 99% of spam, anyway.
The convention served the West well in the European theatre. The Germans, as far as I know, were pretty decent about honouring it for the western Allies. When the Germans took Soviet prisoners, though, anything went. Captured Soviets were completely deprived of basic necessities, so much so that many Western POWs risked harsh discipline to smuggle them food or water. Millions of Red Army POW's didn't go home.
The situation for German men captured by the Soviet Union was equally bleak.
So Viva Geneva.
zo.
Wouldn't population control take care of itself if the earth was "full?" zo.
I'd argue that this isn't as true as Katz believes it is. The net can match up white supremacists as easily as it can match up lonely quake-playing nerds.
Put another way: in the billion-channel universe, a person can choose exactly what information and people they want to seek out — and if my view of Western humanity is at all correct, it's unlikely that they'll seek out anything that doesn't reinforce what they already believe.
Of course, the net can potentially screw up the transmission of dogma across generations, by giving kids access to more diverse information sources. So I don't think Katz is completely off his nut, but he's simplifying a bit too much.
All right! Let's create a Department of Truth, so that only the best information will be fed to our citizens!
I mean, the FCC's regulation has done wonders for the quality of news handed to us by the networks! (tell me again .. which network was it that staged t-bone collisions with bomb-laden trucks
so they could do a "news" feature on it?)
regulating the Internet should be like regulating food and drugs as much as it should be like regulating books, TV and movies. A hundred years ago, people had no way of determining the quality of the food and drugs that went into their bodies. Now they cannot determine what sources or forces may be behind the information that goes into their minds.
Yes, and I'm sure that methods for judging the quality of information -- methods that will transcend subjectivity -- will be available Real Soon Now. In the absence of that method, I'll hang on to the billion babbling voices of the Internet, thank you very much, Mr. Carr.
zo.
John(burned on the Linux-Mandrake 7.2 Complete, and grumpy about it)zo.
As she explained it to me, the patent process, like the criminal justice system, is adversarial. There's no way the patent office can staff experts in every field in which it grants patents, so it relies on testimony from persons and/or organizations that have cause to oppose the patent in order to understand the issues involved.
So it looks to me like the system has built-in opportunities for activism. Does anyone know more about this, or have any links to any well-documented patent battles? Such might be instructive in replacing the usual whining about the idiocy of the system with an understanding of how to influence it.
zo.
Dude, this is Linux. Everything is optional in Linux.
that I don't have to wait for that "pretty" penguin screen to disappear on my server before going to the command line, or worse yet, get stuck with a full X-based install on a system that I'm trying to set up to be headless
You think that suddenly every distribution of Linux is going to force you to "do a full X -based install" just because Linux has made inroads on the desktop? Man, that's paranoid. I'm sure that even if a consumer-grade Linux distro took off, highly-customizable geek-friendly versions will still be abundantly available.
zo.